Remote processes

I am very outspoken and I work mostly remotely since 2017. Way before of the pandemic I was providing my game design services to many companies all across Europe. My specialty is game economy and gameplay design for free-to-play. Companies contacted me for three main things:

1. To set up the vision for some new project of their.
2. To review and design a new tutorial for their game.
3. To add more monetization features to their games.

My main tasks are always been to become aware of a certain context, study a specific market and provide concrete solutions. All of that online, by remote.

I remember back in the days when I had to wait for the producer to call me after the internal meeting. I wasn’t allowed to participate to their daily standup because they were too lazy to set up a camera and connect with me.

Then the pandemic came and this is now the new normal. Now most of my work is online, but the processes are still the offline ones. I mean, I didn’t saw relevant updates to the game development practices. And that’s a problem.

Game development has many moments, good and hard ones. Especially the hard ones, when you need to tell the others your truth about something are getting always more complicated. Sometimes you notice that things are just not working out. So you should take the courage and speak with your boss and colleagues about that. You can do it by writing on a “public” slack channel or by contacting the leaders in private and have a virtual face to face with them. Still, with the remote something is missing. You always have that colleague with stays silent most of the time. And most of the time that colleague is one of the smartest. But they don’t talk, so you will never know. And possibly then they quit for a better job. And you remember that you never asked them directly to express themselves during meetings.

Like this there are a lot of stories. Remote work brought good things to the industry, but one thing is clear: games are not getting published in the expected volume.

We should update our processes at some point.